Help, I’ve Been Deported From Richistan

By

Robert Frank

Mar 18, 2009 2:29 pm ET

An article in Private Wealth magazine by three wealth experts describes the past wealth boom as a giant economic migration. People who started in the lower economic class “emigrated”–through pluck, luck or credit default swaps–to a new Land of Wealth. A kind of Richistan.

Associated Press

These economic immigrants, say the authors, made their money themselves so they carried with them their old middle-class notions and values. “They and their families then face the challenge of learning how to successfully adapt to the new culture.

“Some never lose the sense of being of being an imposter, a stranger in a strange land, while others plunge into the new culture as quickly as possible, anxious to scrub away all vestiges of the old country,” wrote authors James Grubman, Dennis Jaffe and Keith Whitaker.

Now, the Richistan border is jammed–with people getting deported.

It turns out that many of these immigrants acted like they belonged but were really illegal aliens who got into Richistan with tourist visas and fake passports, also known as borrowed money. Others lost their right to citizenship through their investments: The number of millionaires dropped by a quarter last year and is likely to drop again this year.

So how has the Great Economic Deportation affected the migrants themselves? I asked Keith Whitaker, one of the authors and a managing director of family dynamics at Calibre, the wealth-advisory firm….